♫♪ Handjerks - “Synonym Dance (Swan Meat Remix)”

Imagine this in slow motion. As a face contorts into expression, a whole horizon of light might spill down the crevice of a heaving cheek bone. As a body contorts itself into dance, a whole valley might shift by the weight of a shoulder turned up in its socket and thrown back in orbit.

Simple movements exaggerated by a quantum imagining.

Imagine this sped up. As you watch someone speak, their eyes flicker with the light reflecting back from a bulb, a strobe, a laser, an LED. A lip twitches in the time it takes a star to burst. A night flashes by in an instant.

It could be feasible.

Both impossibilities of time, which I can only even imagine technologically, find each other in relativity and balance in Swan Meat’s remix of Handjerks’s “Synonym Dance”. The track is, in Bauer’s words, “an attempt to speak about something that is unspeakable. It’s not only a song about the lack of language but also about using unrelated concepts as synonyms—to create relations and experiment with an affective language. I understand the synonym dance as a celebration of failure. A resistant dance track.”

Swan Meat forms Bauer’s putty-like vocals into elaborate pillars that support her reworking of the original track’s heavy bass and synth lines. Playfully, she explains how she sent these through an idea of “”underwater crunchy” sound systems as well as the “hi-fi 8-bit” aesthetic of retro revival games like Shovel Knight” to craft what sounds to me like a gestural raga. Detail builds and spreads with an emotionally rhythmic directive, and before it might all swirl forever like smoke back into the sea, a simple beat and a repeated vocal motif sends us out on note of unsettling calm.

The Synonym Dance EP will be released by Berlin’s New Pangea on July 27.